Management of Sensor Networks for Monitoring Environments

As part of a darpa-sponsored project called SMILE, Professor Kang Shin has been developing middleware for managing sensor networks for environment monitoring. This talk will cover the core of SMILE: adaptive query processing (AQP), self-management, and routing.
Sensor networks, built with thousands of small and smart sensor nodes, may be deployed for various applications, which usually require a certain pre-specified network lifetime. Professor Kang will first describe a hierarchical architecture for query processing in such sensor networks, and then focus on energy-aware adaptive query processing. Especially, he will present (1) a cost-based query allocation algorithm that minimizes the total power consumption by maximizing cost sharing among different queries; and (2) an energy-aware Quality-of-Service (QoS) adaptation algorithm that gracefully makes tradeoff between total power consumption and total QoS of all queries when node availability or workload changes.

Among many others, self-management of each sensor node and efficient routing between sensor nodes are essential to support applications like AQP. Hence, the second part of his talk will deal with these two issues.

Kang G. Shin is the Kevin and Nancy O'Connor Professor of Computer Science, and the Founding Director of the Real-Time Computing Laboratory (RTCL) in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan. He currently leads several major basic research projects in the following areas: QoS-sensitive computation and networking; Adaptware and Internet servers; Integration of real-time embedded application and system SW for information appliances, telcomm devices, homes, automobiles, and factories; Real-time operating systems and middleware services; Distributed system architectures for timeliness and dependability QoS; Performance & dependability evaluation with analytic modeling & SW tools. He also applies the basic research results to real-life applications, and educates students and industry engineers.